"I had cast my lot with a Soldier, and where he was was home to me." ~ Martha Summerhayes

"Army had a half day today"

05 April 2013

I think this is decomposing whale skin on my jeans. Probably not fully grown, definitely female. I don't know this, of course; I read it in the paper the next day.

There's a dead whale on Torii Beach. She's all over Facebook, lying there under the heavily clouded sky, a quiet island of navy rising from the cacophony of turquoises and blues and greens and browns of the warm shallow water. We debate going to look--it seems low, but it seems once-in-a-lifetime, but we don't want to traumatize Eva, but she doesn't really get death yet anyway. In the end the kids fall asleep in the car and our problems are solved. We take turns joining other casualty-gazers to stare at the 30-foot corpse.

Earlier she was stuck on the reef a ways out, but she's been washed up to the base of the little cliff by the beach's landing zone. (Because this is Okinawa, and this is Army, so of course the beach has a spot for helicopters to land.) Cars are lined up on the LZ in spacious American rows.

The baby-mom in me stops breathing for a minute when I look over the cliff and see her perfect stillness: the oversize, cross-species embodiment of an unspoken nightmare.

Humanity is out in all its glory. They're almost all Americans because this is on post. A husband and wife stride toward the site, arguing, "If you don't WANT to look at it you DON'T HAVE TO COME," her angry tone contradicting their quick cooperative march. An unsupervised girl tries for a front-row seat on the cliff and accelerates erosion in a serious way, scrambling backwards as earth collapses under her. Down on the beach a dad drags his scared, sobbing four-yr-old closer to the whale. People take smiling pictures with the carcass, throwing up the Japanese two-fingered cheese-u! sign. A couple of Okinawans pseudo-sneak onto post for a gander by walking down the beach because it's low tide.

We wear sweat pants, jeans, business casual, suits, green berets, field caps, and an off-duty gate guard wears a holstered weapon as he watches the girl ruining the cliff; he vaguely considers an intervention. We wield every flavor of recording device, from cell phone to thousand-dollar lens. We gawk.

An MP officiously stands guard on what is probably his most exciting duty of his tour here, preventing...what? We're not sure. Maybe preventing the guy with the son from making him ride the whale for a photo op.

She rests on the sharp coral sand and squishy green seaweed, stretching across the tide lines. The graceful curve of her tail droops pathetically over a half-submerged rock into a tidal pool. It's hard to tell what's what on her bulk--is that a blow hole? I can't find her eye.

"It smells like...rutabaga!" a man says.

I squat for a picture, trying to fit all of her in, and start to fall in the deep broken-coral sand but catch myself. I kneel instead and a boy next to me points out, "There's whale skin...there's a piece of whale skin...there's a piece...there's a piece." We're surrounded by bits of suntanned whale. You can see the white scrapes where they've been rubbed off by the tide dragging her over coral, long after death.

The whole thing is sad and impressive and makes me feel like a chump, and I leave. The next day scientists come and strip her down to her bones and the beach is, not for the first time, covered in blood.

No, we're not on island anymore, but this is going to continue 'til my drafts folder is empty! This is Okinawa is a series meant to capture observations and moments in our last days here, the sorts of things I like to think I'll never forget but know I will. Read more about Oki here and here.

29 March 2013

You know it may have been a crazy few weeks if you're looking forward to an over-24-hour trip with two small kids because you'll get to sit down a lot. And because when you get there, at some point you just may have a long enough chunk of time where you don't have to use the car seat so you can actually wash (and hang dry, which takes all the time) the vaguely poopy car seat cover. Yes, the same car seat cover that will be gracing us with its presence in a metal tube hurtling through the sky far above the Pacific, Alaska, Canada, and finally the East Coast of the United STATES OF AMURRICCAAAA! Moving with 2.5 weeks' notice is no joke, and I may have cracked under the pressure.

I have to keep this short, because I'm supposed to be packing and I can't get caught sitting in front of the computer when a certain someone walks in.

So I'm going to go ahead and make it awkward and say a formal goodbye to our very special group of friends here in Okinawa. You have been generous with your hearts and homes, way more generous than us, in fact. I feel like I've been kind of overwhelmed and take-take-taking from people for at least the last year, and I don't believe in karma but this is better: in our world without karma, you all live the infinity of God's grace (and mercy, when I'm late to meet you for yet another time and you're still friends with me).

Thanks for the last three years: the friendships, the dinners, the playdates, the encouragement. And lately, thanks for the last-this-and-thats, the pictures you let me take, the patience, the handshakes and side hugs and real hugs, the emails and the presents and the cards and the dinners (everything feels so undeserved) and thanks for loving us and our kids so well.

27 March 2013

Generally, I don't agree with using the "It could be worse" reasoning on other people to get their attitudes in line. Because no matter how trivial what they're 'going through' is...it's just really annoying. It can be a highly effective part of one's inner monologue, though.

We are currently spending about a week in a hotel room with two easy-going kids and the diapered dog. I'm sporting a hung-over/post-barfight look thanks to 40 years of pet dander embedded in the walls and maybe some hidden black mold, and my attempts to keep it neat (getting in practice for the new! organized! lifestyle! that I aspire to with every move) have proven Sisyphean. And it's hard keeping the kids happy and my joints have gone all barometric and there's the slight issue of the fact that my husband may not be able to complete 2 weeks' worth of inprocessing in the 2 days that it has come down to. And worst of all, there's only one computer with internet for the two of us.

Now let's take a journey back in time.

In the summer of '91, for three months my family lived in two hotel rooms in the Hotel Panama, Panama City, Panama (had to clarify just in case you were wondering whether it was the Central American country where a drug lord's government had recently been overthrown, or the spring break spot--a distinction my grandmother's travel agent once failed to make--but I digress). Four kids, including a three-month-old--four! what were my parents thinking?! Why didn't they leave at least one of us in the States?--off base house hunting, a long commute to post over potholed roads through crimeridden stoplights (no cell phones! a cattle prod and mace in the car for protection!), oh yeah and things like when you walked into McDonald's there was a 17 year old Panamanian soldier standing there with a gun as big as himself.

I'm a wimp, and I hereby nominate my mother for the Martha Summerhayes Award of Supreme Armywifehood. (If you're wondering who that is, look at the quote at the top of this page.)

02 January 2013

08 November 2012

I'll be 41 weeks pregnant tomorrow, and my brain has more or less been replaced by spare amniotic fluid sloshing around between my ears, so all of those profound half-written blog posts? Not gonna happen. (Do I get to publish them later when my caffeine consumption returns to normal?) This boy's getting served his eviction notice tomorrow. Just for the record, I predict that he is definitely going to be longer than Eva's 19.5 inches and most likely a few ounces bigger than her 9 lbs 1 oz (and that's one reason we're not waiting longer to induce!).

Yesterday (Wednesday here on Oki--election day night back in the States) was one of the most beautiful days we've had all year. At first I was really disappointed to not be having a baby, but eventually I ended up grateful that we didn't have to spend such a spectacular day in the icky bowels of Lester Naval Hospital.

06 October 2012

Stress has been pretty high around here with Eva suffering from a case of hand-foot-and-mouth disease. It's ridiculously common on this island. We'd appreciate some extra prayers. On the up side, since she keeps getting sick, I keep saving money by cancelling the babysitter.

AirAsia X launches child-free seating zones - OK, I'll admit, I've seen some seriously bad parenting on airplanes resulting in some seriously bad kids. They make me ashamed. However. Maybe it's the hormones talking, but...I'd like to suggest that we also have the option of seats free of the following: stinky feet or B.O., people who drink so much that alcohol slams into your nose and wakes you up as they walk by, people who crash into you as they walk by, people who leave their lights on when everybody else is trying to sleep*, cranky/angry flight attendants, people who take off their socks and rub scented massage oil into their feet right next to you (speaking from experience), people who watch inappropriate movies on their laptops, and people who leave their seats all the way reclined for the whole flight, leaving you in danger of blood clots because you can't move. Just sayin. *this is a problem that often results in kids crying because they can't sleep because said light is shining in their eyes

Marines begin crashing Ospreys on Okinawa - Several MV-22s have come/are coming to Okinawa, to much dramatic fanfare from some Japanese protestors (they're still skittish because of a helicopter crash on island several years ago). I really loved it, though, when I saw a van covered in anti-Osprey stickers, speeding like a bat out of hell on a road near my house. So safety conscious. (Disclaimers: 1- The Duffel Blog is satire. 2- I do not endorse the entire Duffel Blog site--it's very, um, soldierly. Or make that Marinerly, since that's who founded it. 3- I've been prone to laughing fits since being pregnant, and this one hit so bad I had tears streaming down my face. I was sure labor was imminent. So if you're trying not to give birth, beware, this article may not be safe for you.)

20 September 2012

My grandfather's wars were over before my mother was born. My father's war happened when I was six, too young to understand how safe he probably was, but old enough to sit in my room and cry for it and read the patriotic t-shirts and hear the calculatedly tearjerking songs. My husband's war started when I was in high school, he two weeks into 18, drawn to playing Army and not realizing how the real thing would become his calling.

A couple of months ago, the Pater Familias found himself having to explain what he does at work all the time, sometimes for days or weeks on end. At home when we tell Eva he's "working" he's apparently messing around on his computer (mostly trying to get his CAC reader to work...)

It's strange but not, knowing my early memories of burying my face in daddy-smelling BDUs will be nearly shared by my daughter. Her favorite thing in the world may be burying her face in manly-pungent ACUs, watching out for those prickly closures [comma] hook-and-loop. (Poor girl, I won't spill the secret that BDUs were much softer.) I don't know if she'll share my earliest memory of war--the consciousness that her dad is gone at one, and maybe people aren't shooting directly at him, as we're all slightly more academic types in this family, but he's still not here, he's over there, in that place where the world likes to blow up.

So he explained to her that what he does at work is look for bad guys (which sounds awesomer than "usually write up awards or make powerpoint presentations or narrate ceremonies with my commanding voice"). It's basically true, or was at the time. I don't even know if she knows what bad guys are. But she caught me reading news online the other day and I had no explanation for her burning questions about the burning car photo other than that bad guys did it and a swift X out of the window and an offer to play Uno Moo.

Now that he's popped out for a skosh of a deployment--he should skate back into town just in time to catch the baby--apparently she's still been thinking about what he's up to, not that we've discussed it once. He just had to go on a trip for work. We saw a plane on the afternoon he left, and she asked if it was his, and I may not know my planes but I know to disavow any that say NAVY on the side so I said no, that's kind of like his, but it's not. And today driving home we saw a plane in that same spot in the sky so she asked if it was his, and I said no, and she said but it's kind of like his, and I said yes, and she asked who's in it? What are their names? I said I didn't know.

Are they bad guys?

No, they're good guys.

When I grow up, I want to turn into my daddy and look for bad guys.

You won't turn into your daddy, but you can look for bad guys if you want.

I want to turn into a bad guy.

Um...no, you don't.

I want to turn into a bad guy!

(Amazingly, I was not prepared for this.) Eva, God doesn't want you to be a bad guy. You can be a good guy and look for bad guys.

And suddenly she was sobbing, fountains of sweet tears on those luscious cheeks. I w-w-want to be a bad guy! And finally I understood.

You want to be a bad guy so your daddy will look for you?

::gasp:: Yeah.

The bizarre life of an Army family: in which terrorists meet The Runaway Bunny.

Today on Skype Eva was showing her dad her bwudderfwy wings (they're back in vogue in this house), shimmying most spectacularly in them. Then she plopped herself back down in the computer chair and inquired firmly, "So, Daddy, are you lookin' for bad guys?"

Here's to all the kids waiting so patiently for their daddies to come look for them.

Another side to the much-belabored Akin story: I feel like the exceptionally brave women who get pregnant from rape and (recognizing the child as a fellow victim rather than a perpetrator) don't get abortions are seriously overlooked. This article by one such woman, which says that in 31 states rapists can get paternal rights over the child, was horrifying. We need to recognize that up to 30% of women who become pregnant through rape keep the child, and protect them accordingly. (I've been seeing some outrage online about Paul Ryan calling rape a "method of conception". That's obviously not all it is, but it is unfair to these mothers to pretend that it is not one.)

27 August 2012

It's Sunday night here and Bolaven is officially past us, but we're still dealing with some decent windy rain. It hit a lot of news sites, which is really unusual, but even by the time CNN et al were putting out info, it was clear that it wasn't the monster it was predicted to be. I am sure it was no longer a Cat 4 equivalent by the time it went over us, but I'm too lazy to research it--I think some reports said maximum sustained winds of 104, which is only a 2. Part of me wonders if all of the storm hype around here is just to keep young idiot servicemembers out of the ocean, where they would be attempting to surf the rare waves and just end up getting shishkabobbed on the coral. There was quite a bit of Facebook scoffing at Bolaven on Sunday during the day (when all activities were cancelled), but around bedtime of course things started getting quite howly outside. Eva slept like a champ though and, for once, so did I.

Right about the time when the wind started to die down today, the rain picked up. So we'll have to put off our beachcombing until tomorrow. In between those, we went outside and Eva was "sad about the wind".

And tonight we briefly had a tornado advisory, so a 1-10% chance of one forming. It was terribly exciting (for this coastal girl) for about 5 minutes until I realized that the window had passed and it was over.

Friends on base, of course, had to deal with leaky walls, leaky windows, 12-hour power outages, massive amounts of insects coming in through cracked walls for refuge inside, etc. This is what happens when the government runs your housing.

The worst things we had to deal with were a skosh of water coming in the kitchen door, trying to convince Mad Max to go potty outside (He may have held it for 24 hours, I'm not sure, but he did NOT go inside! I'm so proud of him.), and a significantly stir-crazy 3-year-old.

(And yeah. I rounded my collage corners but not my regular photo corners. Have fun being bothered by that!)

These crazies.

Despite the usual double-whammy of a nighttime typhoon striking on the weekend (I hope to ask God His reasons for those one day), the Pater Familias did get the day off. A cozy Tyholiday.